Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Recently an e-mail exchange took place between my
friend K. Venkat and the retired “eminent historian” Prof. Harbans Mukhia. Venkat
himself gave a fitting reply to the august scholar’s opinions, which is
circulating on the net (I received a copy on 9 Dec. 2012). Herewith I want to
formulate my own comment.

Prof. Mukhia replied to a critical query about
Islamic history in India: “If you derive all your knowledge of
medieval Indian history from ‘historians’ like Sita Ram Goel and Koenraad Elst
and so forth, this is the shoddy history you will land up with. Sita Ram Goel
was a publisher and seller of RSS books and his knowledge of history was
confined to what he had learnt in the RSS shakhas. And the Belgian Elst is an
hony. member of the VHP and knows no Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, any Indian
language, much less Persian, so essential for getting to know medieval Indian
history. And since Persian is not taught in the shakhas, Goel had no inkling of
it either.”

Let
us first set the language allegation straight before addressing the historical
and political issues. Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003) had Hindi as mother tongue, a
language in which he published several historical novels that were praised
precisely for their pure and imaginative language. He went to an Urdu-medium
school where Persian was part of the curriculum. He graduated from Delhi
University where he studied History through the medium of English, a language
in which he published many books. After his studies he lived in Bengal for a
decade and became fluent in Bengali. He also read the Mahabharata and other
Hindu classics in the original Sanskrit. As for myself, since Harbans Mukhia is
unimpressed by real-life experience, let me just point to the testimony of my
diplomas: I studied Hindi, Sanskrit and Persian, apart from Chinese and a
number of European languages. After health problems starting in 2000, I haven’t
been to India much, so my colloquial Hindi has become distinctly rusty; but I
can still consult writings in that language. I also learned a smattering of
classical Tamil a few years ago as well as biblical Hebrew and modern Arabic in
my student days, now all but forgotten but I still know the grammar and some
religious terminology. In all more than enough to do history.

Sita
Ram Goel was a lifelong critic of the RSS, but unlike Mukhia, he knew what he
was talking about. Already as a student, he remarked that only mediocre fellow-students
were going to shakhas whereas the brighter ones were concentrating on other
pursuits or were seduced by Communism. Anyone who has read some of his work
(but that is where the problem for Mukhia arises) has seen for himself that its
message is quite different from the RSS line.

Mukhia
continues: “In the shakhas, they do tell you that Aurangzeb demolished temples
and erected mosques in lieu of them (which he did at Mathura and Varanasi), but
they never tell you that he was also giving monetary and land grants to other
Hindu temples, including some in Varanasi itself, the original document for
which is on display at the Bharat Kala Bhavan on BHU campus. Historians KK
Datta and Jnana Prakash have also published numerous documents of Aurangzeb
giving such grants to temples, maths and other Hindu institutions, and
many more remain unpublished. Naturally ‘historians’ like Goel and Elst
wouldn't know of them, nor would care to know.”

It
is not only in the shakhas that they tell you this. Aurangzeb himself gave
orders for a general destruction of temples and literally demolished thousands
of them. Many other Muslim rulers acted likewise. No amount of special pleading
by the eminent historians can change Islam’s record in this regard. It is
possible that earlier, Aurangzeb gave some grants to Hindu institutions, as had
been the Moghul dynasty’s policy since Akbar. We should of course not take
Mukhia’s word for it (the eminent historians have a well-established reputation
for mendaciousness), and “numerous” is certainly an exaggeration, but it
remains possible. This only shows the inertia of changing a policy, as well as
Aurangzeb’s increase in devotion to Islam, from a compromise-prone successor of
Akbar to a zealous activist for Islam, which does not tolerate idolatry.

One
issue where the much-maligned RSS is clearly wrong in its assessment of
Aurangzeb, is its condemnation of him as a fanatic person. The said grants to
temples, if true, may further prove a point that I have had to make repeatedly:
it is not true that Aurangzeb was a cruel character, he was not more so than
his less notorious predecessors. If he was cruel and fatatic, it was because he
started taking the core doctrine of Islam to his heart. He was a pious person,
more than is good for a ruler, so he became increasingly averse to the
religious compromise on which his great-grandfather Akbar had built the Moghul
empire. So at some point in his advancing years, not his personal predilection
but his growing commitment to Islam took over. That is when he ordered all
Pagan temples destroyed: when the Moghul empire became truly Islamic at last.
But the RSS is fearful to say this, so it tells itself and its listeners that
Islam is okay but that Aurangzeb “misunderstood” his religion due to his cruel
and fanatic personality.

The professor has some advice for my friend: “If
you really want to study history look at the works of professional historians
-- Tara Chand, RP Tripathi, Mohd. Habib, ABM Habibullah, Satish Chandra, Irfan
Habib, RM Eaton, Cynthia Talbot and many other stalwarts who gave their life
time to studying medieval history from the original Persian sources, not from
third rate and motivated translations like History
of India as Told by its Own Historians. Motivated? Sir Henry Elliott, who
compiled this 8-volume series, wrote in his Preface: The series is being
compiled ‘to let the bombastic babus of India know how terrible Indians' life
was until the British came to their rescue’!! So, Sir Elliott translated only
those passages from the Persian language chronicles of medieval India which
spoke of Muslims' atrocities on the Hindus!! He will tell you that Aurangzeb
demolished temples, but not that he also patronised them!!! Much like the RSS
does now and chaps like Goel and Elst follow in their footsteps.”

See,
the eminent historians are as good at the use of exclamation marks as your
average Hindutva internet warrior. And yes, Elliott was guilty of espousing the
same theory which the eminent historians have been spreading, viz. that the
British took India from the Moghuls, omitting the successful Hindu effort to
liberate most of India from Muslim occupation and then succumbing to the
British. But that doesn’t make his translations wrong. He selected those parts
which would be most telling for the atrocities undergone by the Hindus under
Muslim rule so that they would appreciate British rule by contrast – and then
translated these faithfully. He reminded his Hindu readers that their “own
historians” (meaning India-based Muslim chroniclers) had reported these Islamic
atrocities. Anyway, I would like to see the secular improvement, e.g. how do
you translate the frequently-used Arabic verb q-t-l, Persian kushtan,
both meaning “kill”. There aren’t too many nuances to that, are there?

Elliott’s
translations were correct, but yes, they were selective. Secularists would have
preferred to plough through an 88-volume rather than an 8-volume translation.
But they are at liberty to go through all the untranslated parts and try to
find a refutation there of what was described so explicitly in the translated
parts. The Muslim chroniclers were in no mind to undo all the destruction they
had evoked, so in the less dramatic parts of their work, they explored more
leisurely subjects but refrained from trying their hand at what the secularists
would like to read there, viz. any refutation of the grim picture they had
first painted, and which Elliott and others have ably translated.

For
lack of facts, Prof. Mukhia likes to throw names around instead. But a real
historian remains unimpressed by this show of name-dropping. The fact that
Prof. Mukhia has many like-minded colleagues in academe while his opponents
have to remain on the outside is not the result of better competence among his
friends, but of a deliberate policy in university nominations. Any young
historian who lets on too early that he has pro-Hindu convictions, will see his
entry into academe barred. Word will spread around that this man is “dangerous
to India’s secular fabric” and he will be excluded. There have been some old
historians who entered the profession before their cards were on the table and who
only became forthright critics of Islam at the end of their careers, the likes
of Prof. Harsh Narain and Prof. K.S. Lal, both since long deceased. Today among
university historians, the school that sets the record on Islam straight is
simply non-existent.

Fortunately,
the political equation that makes the present secular-Islamic bias possible, is
bound to come to an end one day. The elderly Prof. Mukhia won’t live to see
that revolution anymore, but it is sure to happen. The truth which the eminent
historians have long suppressed, will shine in the open. On that day, I
wouldn’t liketo be called Harbans
Mukhia.

The professor concludes: “I know this would have no
effect on you. But just by chance if you can pick up enough courage to study
history on your own and not parrot the history taught in the shakhas. Best
wishes, Harbans Mukhia”

It seems Harbans Mukhia
mistook his correspondent for some fanatic Hindutvavadi, the kind who remains
impervious to facts. Not that I know many such cases, for even the most extreme
ones I’ve met remain true to a central fact that really occurred, viz. Islamic atrocities
against Hindus. Some of them have personally lived through the Islamic carnage
at the time of Partition or during the Bangladesh liberation war, massacres
which completely dwarfed all Indian religious riots put together (including the
largest of them all, the killing of three thousand Sikhs by Congress
secularists in 1984). But this correspondent is a successful cyberprofessional
in Silicon Valley, who has made a more sophisticated study of just what it was
that Islam wrought in India.

The greatest insult which the
eminent historians could fling at Sita Ram Goel or myself is that we are
“parroting history taught in the shakhas”. First off, I don’t even know what
history they teach there. I have visited a few shakhas and can’t remember any
history being taught there. I speculate it is streamlined to fit the Hindu and
nationalist narrative, or at least that Mukhia wants to convey that impression.
So be it, but historians have other sources for their history-writing and are
not parrots of a party or movement. The main exception are the Indian secularists,
whose conclusions are invariably those desired and taught by the Nehruvian
rulers.

A second mail by the professor
starts out by ridiculing the RSS concept of history: “First, the RSS rant
started in the 1960s with the figure of 300 temples destroyed by the Muslim
rulers; then in the 70s another 0 was added. Yet another got added in the 80s.
But by the 90s the Sangh Parivar ran out of 0s, so they adopted another arithmetical
formula of multiplying by 2 and the figure now stood at a respectable 60,000.”

This claim may be true or not, but I
am not privy to RSS historiography. As a matter of fact, 60,000 may just happen
to be a good number, for the documented cases of temple destruction (and they
already run into the thousands) are necessarily only a fraction of the more
everyday cases, which must have been even more numerous. But we as historians
can only deal with documented cases, especially since these are difficult enough.
Indeed, of the ca. 2,000 cases listed by Sita Ram Goel, and more than 20 years
after having been out in the open, not one has been refuted by Prof. Mukhia and
his school.

So, like most secularists, he goes hiding behind an
American self-described Marxist, Prof. Richard Eaton: “RM Eaton, who would
necessarily be suspect in your eyes because he is a an American historian,
examined the number of temples destroyed in the whole expanse of medieval India
from 1200 to 1760 and came to the figure of 80. He has located the exact source
of information or each demolition and put all the information in a tabular
form. His brilliant article is called ‘Temple Desecration in Medieval India'.
By the way, Eaton is aware of the figure of 60,000 handed out to credulous people
like Sita Ram Goel, Koenraad Elst and yourself.”

In several respects, Eaton’s count is incomplete.
Muslims destroyed Hindu temples before 1200 and after 1760 too, witness the
near-absence of the once-numerous Hindu temples in Pakistan, witness the
regular occurrence of temple destruction in Bangla Desh. It is also seriously
false that for this period, Eaton’s count is complete. How could it be?
Off-hand, Venkat could name a few cases from his own Tamil village, which was
only briefly touched by the Islamic invasions but nonetheless already lost
several temples, and they don’t figure in Eaton’s list. Archeologists regularly
find remains of destroyed temples, often underneath mosques, which do not and
cannot figure in Eaton’s list. Finally, one item on Eaton’s list doesn’t mean
one temple destroyed. The thousand temples destroyed in Varanasi during
Mohammed Ghori’s advances ca. 1194 form only one item on his list. What Mukhia
calls “eighty” is in fact thousands of temple demolitions. So in spite of his
Islam-friendly intentions, Eaton has only proven what Hindus have been saying
all along: Islam has destroyed thousands of temples.

I had in fact answered
Eaton’s list and explanation when they were published: “Vandalism sanctified by
scripture”, Outlook India, 31 Aug.
2001 ( http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?213030). Needless to say, my arguments have never been
refuted by anyone. Secular historians are so sure about controlling the
information flow through education and the media that they don’t bother to
interfere when their falsehoods are exposed. In the article, I also mention
Eaton’s sidekick Yoginder Sikand, then a furious Hindu-hater and secularist
journalist. But in the meantime, he has recanted and exposed the whole self-serving
buffoonery that does by the name secularism: “Why I Gave Up On 'Social Activism'”, Countercurrents.org, 19 April,
2012 (http://www.countercurrents.org/sikand190412.htm).

Prof. Mukhia goes on: “Incidentally, Hindu temples
were also demolished by Hindu rulers long before Muslims came to India. King
Harsha of Kashmir had appointed an officer, devopatananayaka (officerin-charge of uprooting of gods) as reported by Kalhana's Rajatarangini and
mosques were also destroyed by the Hindu rulers in medieval India. Details of
it can be found in my book, The Mughals of India. Incidentally, I have
never been funded by any US agency, University or institution and all my
education has been in India, and all schooling in Hindi medium. This is just to
guard you against the stupidity of levying charges such as you have done
against the most outstanding Indian historian of our time, Romila Thapar.”

As for Harsha, chronicler Kalhana says: “Prompted by
the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk.” It is simply not true that
his case exemplifies a Hindu type of iconoclasm. On the contrary, he merely
shows the influence of Islamic iconoclasm. Half-literate secularists keep on
repeating this story a decade after it has been refuted in my paper “Harsha of
Kashmir, a Hindu iconoclast?”, ch.4 of my book Ayodhya: the Case against the Temple (Delhi 2002; http://www.scribd.com/doc/10022510/Ayodhya-3-Books-by-Koenraad-Elst).It should be granted to Prof.
Harbans Mukhia, as to his colleague Prof. Irfan Habib, that they have
faithfully followed the old Nehruvian line of distrusting the “foreign hand”,
particularly the Americans. This is very unlike their colleague Prof. Romila
Thapar, who has been lavishly sponsored in Washington DC. And among their
generation, this was still exceptional. Indian secularists were admired from
afar, followed by the leading American scholars of India, like Prof. Paul Brass
or Prof. Robert Frykenberg, but keeping their distance because of the reigning
anti-Americanism. Now however, Indian academics of the right persuasion are
openly courted and hosted by American colleagues.

Returning to
the subject-matter, the professor asks: “But the question is more complex: how
is it that Aurangzeb, an orthodox Muslim on RSS account, waited for 21 years
after coming to the throne to reimpose the jazia? You remember the date
of its abolition by Akbar but not one of its reimposition which is 1679. How
did he keep his religious zeal in check for 21 long years when he was the
undisputed sovereign of India? And why was he giving grants to temples while he
was keen on demolishing it? The questions is WHY?”

“The answer is that huge and complex empires are not
governed by religious zeal of its rulers but by an enormously complex
interaction of political, administrative, cultural, social and religious
considerations. Remember Rajiv Gandhi passing a Bill in Parliament after the
Shah Bano judgment of the Supreme Court and getting the doors to the Ram
Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid disputed site opened almost simultaneously? Was he
being a zealous Muslim or a zealous Hindu or just a clever political
manipulator?”

Strictly speaking, not the Government but the Court
opened the locks of the Ayodhya building. But it stands to reason that the two
played together, and that the Court executed the policy desired by the
Government. At any rate, yes, Rajiv Gandhi was a clever manipulator, zealous
only in furthering his personal power and wealth. He intended to solve the
communal situation bloodlessly by handing the Hindus full control of Ayodhya
(including the right to rebuild a temple instead of the Babri Masjid) and
giving the Muslims other goodies, such as a Sharia-inspired change in the
lawon Muslim divorce or the ban on
Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses.
This not-so-principled but very practical policy, typical of the “Congress
culture”, would have succeeded but for the intervention of the eminent
historians and like-minded intellectuals: they raised the stakes on Ayodhya and
the Babri Masjid (“the bulwark of India’s secular polity”, etc.) so much that
the Government could no longer pursue its pragmatic give-and-take plan. The
result was endless religious riots, the surreptitious demolition, and more
riots culminating in the Muslim bomb attacks on Mumbai of 12 March 1993, which
pioneered a new Muslim tactic repeated in many other bomb attacks including
those on the US of 11 September 2001. The eminent historians have blod on their
hands.

It is also true that the Moghul empire was based on a
religious compromise, that Aurangzeb’s conversion to a more principled Islamic
policy jeopardized this compromise, and thereby endangered the empire itself.
At the end of his life, amid Hindu rebellions, Aurangzeb understood this well
enough. But he was too much of a pious Muslim to turn the clock back.

“As for Sita Ram Goel -- he used to rant regularly in
the Indian Express about the little
that RSS had taught him of history: Islam teaches you intolerance, every Muslim
ruler was inspired by Islam to destroy Hindu temples and Hindu society etc.
etc. and how Marxist historians cannot face up to the truth of all his rants.
You obviously read all this avidly. You obviously did not read 'Reflections of
the Past' in the same paper dated 30.4.1989 by a non-descript historian called
Harbans Mukhia. Since that date, Sita Ram Goel did not write a thing at least
in the Indian Express. Please check
it out; it should be available on the IE website. If not, you will find it in
the same non-descript historian's book Issues in Indian History, Politics
and Society, pp. 31-34. Please forgive me for advertising my own writings;
I avoided reference to myself in my earlier response, but since you were out to
challenge us secular historians, I felt compelled to reverse my earlier
decision. In any case you wouldn't have heard of many historians anyway; the
RSS never lets you know that they exist.”

Well, I didn’t know about this episode. 1989 is the
year when I first met Sita Ram Goel, at the end of the year. Arun Shourie was
then the editor of Indian Express,
and in that capacity, he published a number of articles that went against the
secularist opinion. In his books on religion and communalism, he made use of
insight he had learned from Goel. It is very much news to me, and does indeed
sound highly unlikely, that Shourie would have censored Goel. And it sounds
completely ridiculous to assume that Goel laid his pen aside because of what an
eminent historian wrote. For the next 14 years, Goel keept on writing
forcefully against all anti-Hindu forces including those represented by Mukhia.

As a parting-shot, the eminent historian informs us a
bit more about his locus standi
regarding translations: “By the way, the translations of the medieval Indian
Persian texts are quite often atrocious. I happen to know because my doctorate
at Delhi University back in 1969 was an evaluation of these texts. It is called
Historians and Historiography During the Reign of Akbar.”

As already said, “killing”
is something that happened frequently when Muslims encountered Hindus, and the
Muslim chroniclers thus had to describe this process quite often. Harbans
Mukhia has not convinced us that under the hands of the translators, “killing”
only got mentioned as a mistranslation of, say, “tolerating”. Maybe the more
abstruse elements in the narrative were subject to mistranslation, but the
relation between Hindus and Muslims was pretty straightforward and hard to
mistake for friendship.

The august professor bids us goodbye: “Voila, this is
my last intervention in this so-called debate. I have better things to do than
rectifying the RSS version of history. Best wishes, Harbans Mukhia”. Amen to
that.

6 comments:

I could not believe, and yet I did that the socalled eminent historian has not learnt a single syllable in the last ten years! I have closely read several of his speeches, pamphlets and article including that in the Indian Express on the same issue. The passages quoted in the above post has all the old stuff, almost verbatim, Mukhia already ranted here, there and everywhere for decades and no single substantial point he adds since. Except, his abuses to Goel and Eslt take more space now (because of being otherwise vacuous on the point?). But again no new abuse even, but the same RSS-linking. Which is doubly bogus as a ‘charge’. First, because that does not refute the facts and arguments actullay offered by Goel or Elst. Second, it is simply preposterous that RSS could teach any single thing to intellectuals like Goel. If at all, it has been other way round for a good number of RSS folks. Out of communist-blindness Mukhia cannot see it. Because, then what will he say?

The thing is these Mukhias and Chandras were typical, if somewhat educated communist boys and remained so all life. Their writing, reading and speaking testify it. None but a communist propagandist writes and speaks in the manner and with such fixed and very limited content. Abuse as a technique of communist academics is a well-known fact. Mukhia to genuine academics is what Ranadive was to great politicians. Deriding genuine scholars like Goel and Eslt, but not able to even touch the high intellectual mettle they shown. Mukhia's all arrogance derives from the Soviet style academic-power his ilk held long, via big chairs. The chairs they got not for scholarship (even after 43 years Mukhia only hurls abuses in the name of scholarly advise!), but as a political position suitable for Congress bosses. This new outpouring of Mukhia confirms beyond any doubt that he could not move from being an ordinary communist propagandist.

People like Mukhia are no better than holocaust deniers. Imagine if denial of holocaust was the official position and the historians were busy citing example how some Nazis were benevolent and helped Jews, all the while totally ignoring death chambers, well, welcome to the delightful world of Indian academy. These 'official' historians still enjoy a lot of reputation. Imagine who BBC consulted while making very popular series like 'The story of India', which also run in it's dubbed Hindi version in front of unsuspecting Indians. Irfan Habib, Harbans Mukhia, William darlymple.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.